Mobify Studio Update

We’re excited to announce some new updates to Mobify this week!

We’ve created a simple way for you to insert a floating ‘Add to home screen’ bubble into your mobile site. This will help you tell your iPhone visitors how to add your site to their home screen as though it was an app!  Furthermore, apple touch icons will now work when a visitor bookmarks your mobile site to their home screen using an Android device.  Look for a followup post on the blog in the next few days on how to integrate this new feature into your Mobify site!

Add to Home Screen Bubble

The Choose screen now shows selector information about the block underneath your cursor. This will help you pick stronger selectors for your mobile view.  Ideally you should pick blocks that have either classes or ids that you intend to keep even when you make updates to your site style.  For example, picking a div with class ‘article’ would be a strong selector if you plan on always having articles contained in a div with that class name.

We have significantly reduced the byte size of pages using unicode. Unicode is used for many non-English languages, and this improvement will make these pages load even faster.

We’ve made improvements to our content selection routines! Our block choosing system has always supported both CSS selectors as well as XPATH.  Previously our selection algorithms preferred the XPATH over CSS selectors when both were available.  Our testing has shown that the CSS selector is more likely to be correct, and our system now prefers CSS selectors if they are present.  This should reduce the chance of breakage of the source website HTML is modified as CSS classes and ids are generally preserved through incremental changes.

Performance monitoring – we’ve added some new features that will help us track performance bottlenecks in our system, and should help us create an even faster mobile experience in the weeks to come.